6.19.2006

The New Place...

As I alluded to in the last post, we have a new place to live. You can find it about here,


just south of Herndon off of Sunrise Valley Drive.

The apartment searching seemed like it took forever, mainly because the first four places we talked to had zero availability close to the time frame we needed it. It was interesting to look back at how our emotions affected the whole decision process. The first place we found that actually had an apartment available, seemed so great at the time because we were getting so desperate (even though it wasn't all that nice). Then, by the time we got to the last place at the end of the day, we were getting so tired that we didn't even give it a chance. At that point we sat down at a Starbucks, laid everything out and decided on Woodland Park Apartments.

Even though its only been a year, life will certainly be different than the last time we lived in Virginia. Many friends have moved on (or soon will move on) to other parts of the country. But, we've had a lot of good practice meeting new ones this past year. We are certainly a lot further away from "the action" in Arlington, but I'm not sure that we necessarily want to be that close to "the action" anyway. I'm not sure I even know what I mean by "the action," but apparently it deserves quotation marks, which means it must be cool. Looking at this map of coolness index (I was having too much fun with Google Earth), we are now sitting right smack of the middle of the not so cool zone.
I guess now we'll treat going out to Arlington/ Alexandria just like going from Arlington to DC before (Jumping two coolness zones in one night is a big step). We'll have to depend on our remaining friends in Arlington to keep this married couple in the burbs hip. Despite the loss of coolness, we did get a place that is a lot cheaper, a lot nicer, and a lot closer to work; so I think we're pretty happy with our choice.

6.12.2006

One Wedding and a Beach Trip...

I've dropped the ball on blog entries recently, but Sarah and I have remained pretty busy the past two weeks. The problem is what to write about - I think I'll go with chronological order and start with...

Devon and Dan get hitched in Charlottesville: It was a beautiful ceremony, Deborah hit a home run on her first wedding homily and everything went great. There was a mini-reunion, as even though it was a fairly small wedding, Sarah and I got to catch up with more than a few old friends that are much harder to see in Colorado.





My only complaint had nothing to do with the cermony, more to do with the timing of the event itself. On one hand the timing was great, only one set of plane tickets served three diferrent purposes for us, and the wedding was conviently on our way to the beach. On the other hand, I was pushing to get down to the beach that night to avoid traffic, and in general not waste a half a day driving. You would think Devon and Dan would consider our priorities a little bit more (especially considering world-class nature photographer Ben was carpooling with us) but they scheduled the wedding for 3:00 and the reception didn't move quick enough, as several of the cool things happened after we had to leave. That brings us to ...

Beach Week at Nags Head: We made it down to the beach house just before beer o'clock (slightly before 2:00 am) had a drink from the keg and promptly went to bed. I think the main thing to say is that it went way too quickly. We kept ourselves busy: beach volleyball, drinks in the pool, mini-golf, eating seafood in restaurants, drinks in the hot tub, Halo, spraying Kenroche with the kitchen sink hose, cooking our own seafood, Jockey's Ridge (giant sand dune) drinks in the house, football in the ocean, X-men 3 (although an entertaining movie, not as good as X-men 1 or 2 IMHO) reading on the beach, and of course Gallon Day.

Jockey's Ridge


Currituck Sound

Unfortunately, the blame lies solely with me that Gallon Day participation was down 33% this year. All I can say is, I'm planning to return Gallon Day to all its glory by making sure that I drink a gallon of beer on one day at Beach week next year.

I'll go into the details next time, but as a teaser let's just say that Sarah and I have an apartment in the Reston/Herndon area with a lease starting on July 22nd of this year...